Education and Skills Minister Alan Johnson speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester

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There was a point in Alan Johnson’s life where he had to choose between two roads. One road would take him back to grinding poverty in London, where he would eventually defy the odds and become a postman, then a union leader and an MP, serving as education secretary, then health secretary and home secretary.

The other road would see 13-year-old Alan and his sister Linda moving in with his mum’s family in Liverpool.

“We loved it in Liverpool,” explains Alan, 63. “We’d visited with my mum when I was younger and my sister and I had very happy memories. It was the first place we ever went to the seaside. I remember paddling on the beach at New Brighton in my baggy underpants and feeling that we were on a real holiday. It seemed like another world from the slums of London.”

Alan’s mum Lily died when he was just 13, leaving him and Linda, 16, to fend for themselves.

“When my mum died we went up to Warham Road (in Anfield) with my auntie Peggy,” says Alan. “She wanted us to stay with her. It would have been a very different life if we had.

“To us that house in Anfield was the height of luxury. It had been build in 1926 and had three bedrooms with gardens front and back, a bath, inside toilet and electricity.

“By contrast our street in London had been condemned in the 1930s, but two decades later we were still living there. When I was born in 1950 the housing trust had given us two rooms in the big shared building – one for sleeping and one for eating – and a cooker on the landing. There was no electricity and everyone (at least five families) used the same front door and the single outside toilet.”

But they took the decision to go back to the life they knew in London.

“You never know what would have happened if you’d gone down the other path,” says Alan. “But London – as bad as it was – was what we knew. So we went back and Linda looked after me.”

Alan has written his autobiography, which he says aims to “bring my mum back to life, and to celebrate the two women – her and Linda – to whom I owe everything.”

It starts with his mum and dad – Lily and Steve – meeting during the war. At the age of 18 she had gone from Liverpool to London to work for the NAAFI. There she met Steve at a dance, and dazzled by his white pianist’s gloves she had married him.

But the man Alan describes as “the man they invented the word feckless to describe” was not cut out to be a husband or a dad.

“The little money he earned as a pub pianist he squandered on his clothes, beer, fags and the horses,” he explains.

“Despite her poor health (Lily had a weakened heart following childhood rheumatic fever) she worked relentlessly. She was a charlady in the posh houses but also did any extra hours she could get in shops and cafes.”

He says in the book’s prologue: “I don’t know whether he killed anybody (in the war). What I do know is that it could be said he helped to kill the woman beside him.”

That woman, of course, was Lily, the pretty petite girl from Anfield “with a Doris Day nose – that she called her ‘titty nose’ – that she insisted I had inherited”.

Often absent, Steve moved out completely to live with a barmaid when Alan was eight.

The book tells of Alan and Linda’s struggle to stay together after their mum’s death and not to be taken into care.

Somehow, they succeeded. He and his sister were constantly asked, first by the hospital administrator, why they hadn’t an adult with them. “I felt like telling her we were fresh out of them,” he says.

The story ends with Alan at 18, working as a postman and married with two children.

“I married a single mum and I had an instant family,” he says.

Rather than hiring a ghost writer Alan has put the book together himself.

“I always wanted to be a writer,” he laughs. “I have a bunch or rejection letters to prove it.

“When I was a teenager I used to send off short stories. None of them were published, so to be able to write a book was a real honour.

“I enjoyed the writing and the editing process, honing it to get it just right.”

The book has had rave reviews and this month Alan will be reading sections of it and taking part in a Q&A at Waterstones in Liverpool One.

“I’m very much looking forward to bringing the book to Liverpool,” he says.

“My family still lives in Anfield in the same house so I’m looking forward to seeing them.

“More than anything, I’m looking forward to celebrating my mum in her hometown. Liverpool has been very good to me over the years and it feels right to be bringing this book about my mum back home.”

This Boy by Alan Johnson is out now priced £16.99. An Evening With Alan Johnson takes place at Waterstones Liverpool One on Tuesday May 28 at 7pm. Tickets are £4 from 0151 709 9820 or in store.